Friday, September 20, 2013

Intervention

Hey kids, it’s Beckley.

Most of you guys have really taken the UAS immigration well.  I feel like whenever I bring up the troubles that have existed, it makes it sound like Haven is full of prejudiced people.  It’s really not and you guys know that.

But there are some incorrigibles.  They keep acting out, starting fights, harassing people, and they keep getting punished.  The Council has put these guys on half rations, they’ve given them extra work details, they’ve confined them to their homes when not working.  Nothing has seemed to work.  Among the most frequent offenders, you’ve got Jeremy here in Haven and K-Pap on the side of the UAS.  Actually, I refuse to call this grown adult K-Pap.  I have no idea what the K stands for or what Pap means, so I’m just going to assume it’s short for Kingsley Pappington.  Dude’s name is Kingsley Pappington from now on.

So you no doubt know both these gentlemen.  Jeremy did the same thing every time.  He gets drunk and wanders into the UAS area at night and starts screaming at them to go home.  During the day, he follows UAS workers around, yelling at them to go home and trying to trip them.  Even when he’s not intoxicated, he’s a generally unpleasant person and has been involved in, by my count, three different physical altercations and an infinite number of verbal altercations.  Kingsley, on the other hand, is still militantly pro-UAS and is always loudly talking about how his soldier brothers will be rolling in any day now to butcher us all.  He talks about how Haven is a mere shadow of the greatness that was his UAS hometown.  He keeps cornering Haven citizens and mocking the war, talking about how he left Haven solders dead on the field to reanimate, and so on.  He’s clearly just trying to get a reaction.  Clearly he’s all talk because if he really still wanted to be out fighting he would be.  And if his hometown was really that great, he’d leave.  But he doesn’t.  He’s all talk and everyone knows it.  Yet he still finds people to fight with him.

These two jewels of the human race have been the freaking joy of my life.  I really can’t even remember what my life was ever like without them.  Don’t get me wrong, there are a few other clowns on both sides that can’t play nice, but these two are the kings of them.  The Council has noticed their repeated punishments haven’t seen much effect.  So I’ve suggested something new.  Behavioral therapy.

Behavioral alteration was always pretty controversial.  You had drug and alcohol rehabs that would make use of it decades ago when this kind of intervention was really in vogue.  It, frankly, looked quite a lot like bullying.  In a nutshell, the idea is to alter a person’s behavior by specifically targeting and punishing that behavior whenever it occurs.  There’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s the basic gist.  Now behavioral therapy can be used effectively at times.  Take boot camp for example.  Lots of behavioral techniques there to alter people’s behaviors and methods of thinking.  Still, behavioral therapy could get pretty harsh.  Eventually, in the case of the rehabs, people decided that maybe the best way to treat addiction wasn’t to make addicts wear diapers or dunce caps just because they’re acting like babies.  But things have changed.  We live in a new world now.  A harsher world.  It occurred to me that perhaps revisiting behavioral modification wasn’t a bad idea.

Ok, look, there’s some commotion going on outside.  I keep hearing snatches of talk about the UAS.  I’m going to cut this off here.  I’ll get back to my undeniable therapy genius later, after I figure out what’s going on.

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